Very cool. It's about the measure, repeated several times in each verse, that sounds like it not only skips a beat, but lurches awkwardly (and excitingly). Pun

Very cool. It's about the measure, repeated several times in each verse, that sounds like it not only skips a beat, but lurches awkwardly (and excitingly). Punchline: > What makes this rhythmic idiosyncracy different from what has been studied by most music theorists is that this slightly attenuated beat is performed by the whole ensemble in unison, and it’s not a delay that is “made up for” right afterwards. In other words, it’s not a local deviation from the beat that maintains the pulse over a longer span of music, but a permanent shift of where the beat occurs. Satisfying explanation for one of the more unsettling measures of rhythm in any genre of music. Personally, I never thought too hard about this measure when listening but it definitely stuck out to me. It felt like some kind of slightly rushed triplet rhythm, reminiscent of that Romantic tendency to throw triplets into a melody (did anyone else play piano and struggle to master the timing of these triplets?). This feel seems confirmed by the signature proposed in a sibling comment, 21/32, which has the decimal value 21/32 = 0.65625 when interpreted as a fraction. Very close to two thirds, just a tiny bit sped up. Rhythm is not meant to be perfect in performance, so my intuition is that "slightly sped up two thirds" was closer to their intention than 21/32.